When I meet a woman on a dating app and things don’t work out romantically, I don’t automatically want her out of my life. Sometimes I’ve met someone whose values line up with mine, whose company I enjoy, and who seems like a great person. The attraction just isn’t there for one of us.
To me, that leaves room for a friendship. We’ve already learned something about each other. We were interested enough to connect in the first place. It feels strange to decide that the whole connection has no value because it didn’t become the kind we originally had in mind.
Nobody necessarily did anything wrong. One person not feeling a spark doesn’t make the other person less worth knowing.
I’ve started making more room for these platonic friendships, and the pushback has surprised me. Some of my guy friends question it. Some of my women friends do, too. Their concern is that a future partner would have trouble trusting me if I kept women around whom I’d once wanted to date.
In their version, these friendships can look like a collection of future options: people I might turn to if my relationship went badly. I understand why that possibility would make someone uncomfortable. It’s also a strange experience to hear a friendship I value described as an emergency exit.
The fact that I once considered dating someone is real. I’m not trying to erase how we met. But I don’t experience that beginning as a permanent description of what the connection is now. Sometimes getting to know someone changes the place they have in your life.
For me, friendship is part of what makes a romantic connection appealing in the first place. If the romantic part doesn’t develop, I don’t instinctively want to discard everything else.
I’d especially like to hear from women who keep these friendships themselves. How do you see a partner who does the same? Does meeting through a dating app keep casting a shadow over an otherwise platonic friendship, or can the friendship eventually be taken on its own terms?
